How to replace the sky in a photo in Photoshop

How to replace the sky in Photoshop

This Photoshop tutorial shows you how to replace a boring blue sky with a dramatic cloudy sky.

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In this Photoshop Tutorial, I’ll quickly show you how to replace this sky without making any selections.

We will begin with a photograph that I captured just outside of Austin Texas. It’s a really interesting building (Fun fact: it was featured on the TV show, The Leftovers). The problem is that the sky was plain blue, which isn’t so bad if you use a polarizing filter to make it more blue, which I did. However, because I don’t live in Texas (I’m in California), I’m unable to go back when the sky is different to get a more moody photo. This is a common issue for people who travel and have limited time to capture photographs and have to take the best they can get, given the opportunity.

Next I need a photograph of clouds. I keep a collection in Lightroom of all the clouds and skies that I shoot. Whenever I see an interesting sky, I shoot it with the best camera that I have with me. Sometimes it’s a DSLR and sometimes its a phone (Don’t scoff, I have an iPhone XS and a Google Pixel 3 and they are really quite impressive)

In the beginning of the video, you pasted the swirling cloud background in and enlarged it to cover the whole sky. You didn’t cover the whole sky and told us not to worry, that we would get to that later. If you did cover the bottom of the image with the clouds, it would take care of all the extra blending and color adjustments for that tiny corner area. I do learn things from you, Colin, but sometimes you make me wonder as well.

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